Music of Jack Vees
faculty artist series February 12, 2014 • Morse Recital Hall
Robert Blocker, Dean
Faculty Artist Series
Jack Vees • composer Wednesday, February 12, 2014 • 8:00 pm • Morse Recital Hall
Jack Vees b. 1955
Stigmata non Grata for handbell ensemble Jonathan Allen, Benjamin Wallace, Douglas Perry, Mari Yoshinaga, percussion
Winged for harp and loops Maura Valenti, harp
Lines of Desire for woodwind trio Libby Van Cleve, English horn Thomas Labadorf, bass clarinet T. D. Ellis, bassoon
Rocket Baby cello and electronics Ashley Bathgate, cello
intermission *Please join us in the lobby for a performance of Instrumentallation #1 performed by Andrew Parker, oboe
As a courtesy to the performers and audience, please silence all electronic devices. Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.
Jack Vees, composer
Scenes from Twin Reverb: Alpha Aloha Arash Noori, Jack Vees, electric guitar Twin Primes Kelly Hill, Jean Laurenz, sopranos Brendon Randall-Myers, electric guitar Jack Vees, guitars Arash Noori, guitar Ted Hearne, narrator
A Refutation of Gravity Brendon Randall-Myers, Trevor Babb, Jesse Limbacher, Ian Tuski, electric guitar Jonathan Allen, Benjamin Wallace, Douglas Perry, Mari Yoshinaga, percussion
Artist Profiles
Jack Vees · composer Jack Vees came to the Yale School of Music in 1988 and was one of the founding directors of the Center for Studies in Music Technology, where he still teaches. He moved to New Haven shortly after graduating from the California Institute of the Arts with a degree in composition, where his teachers included Louis Andriessen, Morton Subotnick, and Vinko Globokar, among others. Many ensembles such as Zeitgeist, Ensemble Moderne, and the California EAR Unit have commissioned pieces from him, and his works have been played in such diverse venues from CBGB’s to the Concertgebouw. A collection of his works, entitled Surf Music Again, was released in 1991 on the CRI/Emergency Music label. Over the course of his career, many of his works have had an embedded theatrical quality in them. Some of them even are best viewed as installation pieces, outside of the concert hall. This theatrical element came to the foreground in his one-act opera Feynman. It looked at the eclectic physicist’s life from a perspective that included some of Feynman’s unique ideas concerning space and time. He collaborated with Paul Schick and the Real Time Opera Company on this project. The renowned percussion group Sō premiered this piece and took it on the road. Tonight’s concert will present two short chapters from Jack’s new collaboration with Paul. This new opera, Twin Reverb, is unique in that it is an opera that is designed from the outset to be experienced on the web. That said, it will be presented tonight with both live and electronic elements. Jack also gained recognition as an electric bass guitarist with a personal and unusual approach
to the instrument. Early in his career (1979) his text The Book on Bass Harmonics was picked up by Alfred Music, and quickly became a standard reference for progressive bassists. He has performed in a number of settings, in bands, in a duo with his wife, Libby Van Cleve, and also released a CD, The Restaurant Behind the Pier, which garnered great reviews, not only for the quality of his playing, but also because it may be the only complete album where every single track was made with just the sounds of a bass guitar. Described as “expert” by the Washington Post, “dazzling” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and “absolutely exquisite” by Paris Transatlantic, Libby Van Cleve’s most extreme epithet was from the Hartford Courant which dubbed her “the double reed queen of the new music world.” Van Cleve is recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of chamber and contemporary music for the oboe. Her solo playing is featured on the New Albion, CRI, Aerial, and Centrediscs CD labels. Her solo English horn and oboe d’amore performances are featured on the internationally acclaimed CD, Dark Waters, of music by Ingram Marshall. Compact discs featuring her chamber playing have been released on the Tzadik, New World, OODisc, Braxton House, What Next?, CRI, and Artifacts labels. Ms. Van Cleve is the author of Oboe Unbound, a book on contemporary oboe techniques published by Scarecrow Press, and she is co-author of the award-winning book/CD publication, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington, Yale University Press. Ms. Van Cleve received her Doctor of Musical Arts from the Yale School of Music, her Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts, and her BA magna cum laude, from Bowdoin College. She is the Director of Oral History of American Music at Yale University and oboe teacher at both Connecticut College and Wesleyan University.
Artist Profiles
Her former teachers have included Ronald Roseman, Allan Vogel, and Basil Reeve. A native of Saratoga Springs, NY, cellist Ashley Bathgate has gained international renown as both a soloist and chamber musician. The New York Times writes, “Ms. Bathgate’s rich tone, fluid dynamics and imaginative phrasing captured the magic.” Equally at home in both the concert hall and the rock club, Ashley focuses on presenting concerts that draw from a wide range of musical genres. Her dedication to performing traditional music is equally matched by her passion to promote new music by today’s composers. She is a member of the awardwinning, internationally acclaimed Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Metropolis Ensemble and three chamber groups of which she is a founding member: TwoSense, Bonjour and the newly formed collaboration, Samadhi. She has recorded for Nonesuch, Naxos, Cantaloupe Music, Albany Records, and La-La Land Records. Ashley received her bachelor’s degree from Bard College and a master’s degree from Yale University, where she studied with renowned cellist Aldo Parisot. She currently resides in Manhattan. Thomas Labadorf enjoys varied tastes in musical styles as a chamber musician and a symphonist. He currently performs as principal clarinetist with the New Haven, Waterbury, and New Britain Symphonies. Additionally, he is professor of applied clarinet at Central Connecticut State University and Connecticut College. His musical experience began at age 8 in Argentina with classical guitar lessons, and he continued in the United States playing clarinet in public school music programs. He studied with Stanley Hasty at the Eastman School of Music, and while there, began his professional career as utility clarinetist
for the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. He later continued to perform professionally in various Connecticut orchestras, and retired from the United States Coast Guard Band after 24 years of service. Throughout his career, he has been featured as soloist with many Connecticut orchestras and bands performing the works of Luigi Bassi, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Claude Debussy, W. A. Mozart, Carl Nielson, Gioachino Rossini, and Carl Maria von Weber. He also premiered his own transcription of Jorge Calandrelli’s Concerto for Jazz Clarinet with the Coast Guard Band at the Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic in Chicago. He earned his Master of Music in orchestral conducting at the University of Connecticut, and he is completing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Connecticut. Mr. Labadorf can be heard on Albany Records with the Connecticut Trio performing music of Ezra Laderman, and on Nimbus Alliance performing as principal clarinetist with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra in symphonic works by William Walton. T.D. Ellis has been principal bassoon of the Ridgefield Symphony since 1991 and became the personnel manager in 2001. He is also principal bassoon and personnel manager of the Wallingford Symphony and the Bermuda Philharmonic, and the personnel manager of the Greater Bridgeport Symphony. Mr. Ellis plays bassoon and contrabassoon with the Greenwich Symphony and may often be heard with other orchestras throughout New York and Connecticut. He has appeared as a soloist with the Ridgefield Symphony, Chappaqua Chamber Orchestra and Western CT Youth Orchestra. T.D. is a founding member of Bassoonery, a bassoon quartet. He received his musical education at the Hartt School of Music and the State University of New York at Purchase.
Program Notes
In his spare time he owns and operates The Music Source, an online music store (www. TheMusicSource.org). Working as a music copyist, he has typeset scores for musicians worldwide, including Tony Bennett, Elton John, Celine Dion, Wynton Marsalis, Yo-Yo Ma, Luciano Pavarotti, Vanessa Williams, Michael MacDonald, David Sanborn, the Boston Pops, National Symphony, Rob Mathes, the Grammy Awards, Kennedy Center Honors, Piglet’s Big Movie, the Inauguration of Barack Obama, and others. Mr. Ellis was born in Hollywood, Florida, grew up in West Hartford, CT, and currently lives in Waterbury, CT. Stigmata non Grata (1992) Stigmata non Grata (1992) was commissioned by Corn Palace productions, founded by Jeff Brooks and Maura Bosch. Each year, they mounted a themed concert and on this occasion, commissioned eight composers to write a piece that featured handbells. Their only stipulation was that none of the composers had previously written for handbells. I qualified then, and except for this piece, would still qualify now.
of what various combinations of those parts present to us when the other layers are peeled away. Lines of Desire (2012) Sometimes a piece comes about as a mostly pure abstract idea, the working out in sound of some process the composer has in mind (a fugue for instance). Other germinations are much more pictorial, with the intent being more programmatic or cinematic. Lines of Desire gives a nod to both of these poles. It existed as a concept that sat in my head for a number of years. It then found the right metaphor by a comment that was made by a friend of mine, who is an art/architecture historian. One day we were walking through a local park, and she tossed off a term that I had never heard before. It was a reference to those footpaths that are made not by anyone who planned the park, but by the people who walk through the space. Folks simply want to go from point A to point B, or run on a jogging path that stays in the shade, or any number of other reasons. She said there is a technical term for these resultant paths, “lines of desire” or desire lines. (Architects seem to have special names and phrases for all sorts of everyday objects.)
Winged (2011) In 2011 Maura Valenti asked me for a piece for harp and simple electronics. What I came up with is a piece that could almost be performed live with a “loop” pedal—the kind that can record a phrase, and then can be overdubbed yourself any number of times. One of the hallmarks of loop-based pieces is that by design the player almost always starts with a single loop, then layers on material the compliments the first one. In Winged we see pretty much the opposite. The piece opens with eight layers of Maura all at once, and the rest of the piece is an exploration
In any case, this idea triggered a memory I had about wanting to write a piece where the instruments start out in very close proximity to each other, almost treading on each others’ footsteps. It also fit in with my own desire to write for English horn, bass clarinet, and bassoon, a slightly thicker, earthier lineup than the usual woodwind trio instrumentation. Rocket Baby (1994, revised 2010) This piece was originally commissioned by Jeffery Krieger, and was designed for him to
Program Notes
take on tour with his road equipment in the mid 1990’s. In essence, it was a trio meant for one human, and two superhuman technosampled-cellists. A few years ago, I began the collaboration with Ashley to take these techno parts and turn them into something a human might be able to play. What we came up with are multiple tracks of Ashley that taken together are quite superhuman anyway.
no Prince Charming can bring a happy ending. The first of the two episodes presented tonight is an instrumental prelude that sets the tone for much of what is to come. The second, with its narrator and sopranos, gives us the beginning threads of the details of their adventures, about to begin. A Refutation of Gravity (1984–85)
Intermission with Instrumentallation #1 (1984) Twin Reverb is a new opera project in collaboration with librettist Paul Schick. We previously worked on my opera, Feynman, together, and this is its conceptual offspring. Tonight, we present the opening two chapters of an opera that is designed to exist primarily on the web. It consists of thirty-six chapters, each of them being exactly the same length, much in the format of an old time radio series. It will be released with one new chapter per week as it goes up. We will work with visual artists and animators, to work within the flexibility of web design to create a multimedia environment for those who come to visit Twin Reverb over the span of its creation. One note about the narrative (without the need for a spoiler alert):this story is based on a Hawaiian folk tale, Laieikawai, a story about twin sisters born to a king in a patriarchal society. He needs a son, not daughters, to whom he can hand over his reign. It is rich in a folk tradition reminiscent of Indonesian shadow plays, yet it also resembles the American soap opera, with its attention to seemingly minute storyline details. In a nod to both of these models, Paul has sculpted a narrative that is set in the continental U.S.; the time possibly late 50s, early 60s, but over its course the tale transits into a realm that is somewhat more shadowy, a romance to which
Toward the end of my time spent in California, two pieces, this one and John Henry, came about, and they pointed in a particular direction and a way that I would work in some ways even today. It was a way for me to take two diverse sides of my musical life, the schooled and the extracurricular, and have them push the car in the same direction. I am very grateful to the Yale Percussion Group and guitarists and composers who took up the gauntlet to bring this piece to you tonight.
Upcoming Events
Joel Wizansky and friends february 13 Morse Recital Hall | Thursday | 8 pm Pianist Joel Wizansky and guest artists perform music by Schumann, Bartók, and Fauré. Free Admission
La Bohème february 14–16 Yale Opera Shubert Theater | Fri & Sat, 8 pm | Sun, 2 pm A new production of Puccini’s beloved classic, La Bohème. Giuseppe Grazioli conducts, and Michael Gieleta is the stage director. With the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale. Tickets $19–50, students $13, available at the Shubert Theater Box Office, 247 College St. www.shubert.com • 203 562-5666
Artis Quartet february 18 Oneppo Chamber Music Series Morse Recital Hall | Tuesday | 8 pm Mozart: Quartet in D major, K. 575; Zemlinsky: Quartet No. 4; Brahms: Quartet in A minor, Op. 51, No. 2 Tickets start at $25 · Students $12
Peter Frankl, Wei-Yi Yang, and Boris Berman february 19 Horowitz Piano Series Morse Recital Hall | Wednesday | 8 pm Music of Brahms and Schumann for piano four hands and two pianos, including Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56b, and Sonata in F minor, Op. 34b. Tickets start at $12 · Students $6
Barocco Italiano february 20 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Marquand Chapel | Thursday | 8 pm Yale Voxtet. James Taylor, director. Free Admission
Smithsonian Chamber Players Trio march 2 Collection of Musical Instruments 15 Hillhouse Ave | Sunday | 3 pm Vera Beths, violin; Kenneth Slowik, cello; Pedja Muzijevic, fortepiano. Music of Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn. Tickets $20 · Students $10
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Robert Blocker, Dean